How can we make demographic data even more engaging and accessible? Census data has been available online through numerous data portals, but despite how incredibly useful the insights they provide can be - for people moving, businesses looking to open up a new location, or non-profits wanting to focus their services for maximum impact - detailed census data often remains unused in important decision-making. The visualization was covered on CBC Edmonton News (April 19th 2022, 18:13), as well as CityNews Edmonton and CBC Radio Active. We came up with “This is Edmonton” as a way to both increase ..read more

Bar charts, pie charts, and line charts are the most common types of visualizations. What are some other charts or ways to make your static data more interesting? 6 minute video: 5 of the Most Inspiring Static Visualizations we’ve come across Different charts and colors can make visualizations more engaging. Ultimately, though, the engagement needs to come from the relevance of the insights to your audience as well as the experience of the visualization. Some of the more artistic and novel visualizations may be more challenging to interpret, but the visual beauty they present can draw an audie ..read more

Using physical objects to display data and create visualizations may seem counterintuitive, but doing so can be incredibly effective and engaging. 5 minute video: 5 of the Most Inspiring Physical Visualizations we’ve come across It takes more effort to reproduce them than their digital counterparts, but there’s novelty in engaging our other senses in experiencing data differently. You can smell candy, touch or move playdoh, and feel the gradients of a 3D printed map. You can arrange charts differently with your hands or measure scale with sound. The video above showcases 5 of the most inspirin ..read more

Have you ever wondered if there was a better way to visualize your data? To make it more engaging, more visually impressive, or clearer to your audience? 5 minute video: 5 of the Most Inspiring Map Visualizations we’ve come across We ask ourselves those questions regularly and often seek inspiration from others. There are so many visualizations out there though, and it can be hard to find the few amazing or exceptional ones. To help with getting inspired more quickly, here’s the start of a series on the most impressive visualizations we’ve come across, starting with maps. Links to all of the e ..read more

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. —Blaise Pascal I was listening to a podcast the other day. The speaker had developed a theory that had really pushed his thinking. It was right on the edge of his ability to comprehend. I gave myself a self-satisfied pat on the back; I could understand it no problem.  But then I thought about it some more. I could understand the idea fully formed, but only because someone else had done the difficult formulating work. Could I have come up with that idea on my own? No way.  The Paradox of Brilliance It ..read more

In that last post, we introduced the concept of The Visualization Frontier. It’s a simple rubric to measure the effectiveness of your data visualization.  We defined effectiveness as the combination of clarity and engagement. The closer you are to the red line, the more effective you are. (We hinted at the possibility that the red line is not the same for everyone - that it’s tied to your capability as a data visualizer. A super-skilled information designer might have a red line that stretches almost to the top right corner ..read more

This is part one of a two-part series on building effective visualizations. In this post, we take a shallow dive into evaluating existing visualizations. In the next post, we’ll dive a little deeper as we explore techniques on how to improve them. It’s very easy to visualize data. Too easy. The problem is that it’s rarely done well. It’s very easy to chart your data in current software tools. But it’s very hard to get people to understand that chart. As a result, we’ve become accustomed to complex, confusing, and essentially useless visualizations that obfuscate rather than inform. The visual ..read more

Based on a talk given at Lunchalytics in 2018. In visualization we have a vehicle capable of more than just communicating numbers.  This is Wilhelm Von Osten, he was an elementary math teacher from Germany in the early 1900s. But like many bearded math teachers, he dreamed of more. Von Osten believed animal intelligence was underestimated, and that little bit of crazy in his eyes gave him the courage to pursue this belief further ..read more